Outdoors: Creating a Japanese-inspired garden
My English-style flower garden had its moments of glory but was mostly a mishmash of one-off and failure-to-thrive plants. I wanted something simpler, cohesive, peaceful even; I found all that and more in the Japanese-inspired garden I created in my small Centretown Ottawa backyard.
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Japan's unique gardening tradition, passed from Master to pupil for 1,600 years, is rooted in reverence for the natural world: small ponds or raked gravel suggest the sea, rocks evoke mountains, bamboo speak to resilience, conifers to longevity.
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After much research, I built two types of Japanese gardens: a spiritual Karensansui or dry garden with carefully placed rocks in a sea of gravel (such as the one at Ottawa's Museum of History), and a very small secular stroll or pond garden. The former is complex, so I will describe the stroll garden.
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These began around the 8 th century as places for entertaining and aesthetic enjoyment. They usually include a villa, water, paths, bridges, a gate, as well as plants. My stroll garden is much modified from the Japanese ideal; it depends on available plants and the limits of my small space. The garden is only 14-feet long by 12-feet wide, although it is expanded visually by the borrowed landscape or shakkeir of my neighbour's maples and cedars.
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Japanese stroll gardens are intended to appear natural, as if they grew by themselves, but the components are carefully chosen and arranged. Asymmetry is key; rocks and plants appear in odd-numbered groupings (one, three, five, seven, etc.) often arranged in a triangular shape. Paths and beds are curved; nature has few straight lines. And there are a limited number of elements and plant types with space, or Ma, in between.
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Hardscaping my garden began with the meandering path, which determined the placement of other elements. I chose simple flag stones, flush to the ground. To stay on the path, you must look down at the stones. When you come to wider stones, strollers may pause and look up to see a specific garden view, like a framed work of art. This is the essence of the stroll garden.
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A fence or wall provides a backdrop and encloses the garden. Often these are bamboo, but I already had lattice, which allows air to flow through on hot days, so I kept that.
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I also had a bridge, of sorts. These can be arched or flat, slabs of stone or logs. Mine bridges a downward slope in the garden and is made from floor planks recovered from a demolished workshop. This is in keeping with the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi: succinctly put, embracing imperfect, often aged, natural materials, that illustrate the impermanence of life, a Buddhist tenant.
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